In today's connected environment, a variety of digital image, digital video, and digital audio products are currently available to consumers. Regardless of how digital media is recorded, at some later point in time, the information must become available to other devices—that is, become available to a larger network of digital devices, so that such information may be displayed on a screen, printed to hard copy, stored, or shared with other people. Today, a large number of Web sites exist on the Internet with server computers having the capability to organize and display images, video, audio, and other types of media and digital objects. In a complementary manner, a multitude of different client devices exist with sufficient graphics capabilities for potentially viewing (and/or listening to) this media. For instance, such client devices range from desktop or laptop computers running Web browser software to handheld devices (e.g., personal digital assistants running under Palm or Windows CE), all connected to the Internet over TCP/IP, each with the capability of displaying information. The result is a vast array of media devices with varying levels of capability.
With the continuing explosive growth in cellphone usage, limited-capability client devices are increasingly prevalent, particularly hybrid devices that combine the functionality of a computer and a cell phone into a single device. Many of these devices have constrained display screen size. A given device may have relatively high resolution capability to display a detailed image, for example, but the physical dimensions of the screen itself may be so small as to prevent proper viewing of the subject matter of the image. Commonly, however, limited-capability client devices will often compromise resolution and color capability, thus exacerbating the problem posed by limited (physical) screen size. At the same time, a large body of rich media content exists, through publishers, for potential viewing or consumption by these connected devices.
More particularly, there exists a large body of branded content or assets that presently has not been made available for consumption by limited-capability devices. Here, the quality of the content is directly proportional to the value of the content. Take, for example, branded content, such as the rendering of a popular cartoon character image on a client device. A rendered cartoon that does not look like the branded version people are familiar with is not valuable to users. Therefore, an online user would not pay much for an electronic greeting card or screensaver featuring pre-generated branded content if that content was not rendered in a matter to preserve the branding. In particular, the inherent value in the quality of the content is only preserved to the extent that quality rendering of the content is preserved. Even if the content itself is free (e.g., free artwork), the underlying branding of the content may be very valuable (e.g., corporate logos, trademarks, and the like) and hence maintenance of the integrity of the quality of the content is important to the supplier.
Precious (i.e., very valuable) branded content is especially problematic in this regard. In the process of transcoding or otherwise transforming content from a source format to a format acceptable to a given target device, two immediate issues are encountered: (1) aspect ratio changes (e.g., changing from square image to tall rectangular image), and (2) pixel reduction (caused by target resolution changes). Both of these impact the representation of the subject matter (e.g., character, in branded content), such that the impact is often unsatisfactory to the original content provider. Content providers are loath to permit consumption of their content by users with limited-capability devices, for fear that that may diminish their brands. As a result, this poses a barrier to entry for publication of rich media content, notwithstanding the fact that the media content providers themselves do want to deliver the content in order to better exploit these assets.
What is needed is a system with methodologies that permit content providers, media vendors, and the like to “parameterize” the way the output is delivered to the target device (e.g., handset device), based on what particular features are encountered at the target device. In this manner, delivery of media content may be controlled via a mechanism that preserves integrity of the content subject matter (e.g., branded content). The present invention fulfills this and other needs.